Ever wonder why year after year the media tells us there are 11 million illegal aliens in the country, down from when they used to tell us year after year that there were 12 million, despite the unrelenting tsunami of Third World colonists pouring over the border, day in, day out? The answer is simple: 11 million is a lie.

Professors at Yale University have roiled the immigration debate with a new study calculating there are between 16 million and 30 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. — as much as three times more than most demographers figure.

The professors came up with an estimate by subtracting the number who leave from the number who come in, rather than pulling out of their ear the smallest number they thought the public would be gullible enough to swallow, which is what the liberal establishment appears to do. They say the most likely figure is 22 million, twice the number we usually hear.

But that would make amnesty twice as hard for us to swallow, so do not expect their figure to get much traction with the media or the government.

Seriously, this is the method used to get 11 million:

The general idea is to take the total number of people who claim to be foreign-born in Census Bureau survey data, then subtract the number of people who are in the country legally. The difference is deemed to be those here without permission.

They call it the “residual method.” It assumes that illegal immigrants fearing deportation fill out surveys and give honest answers about where they were born. You would just as soon get honest answers out of the mainstream media.